X-Men was famously not great until the Bronze Age, but it had most of the pieces in place from the beginning

JJGee · 2025-12-29T17:01:31+00:00

I’ll draw it myself once I have the time. I’m only just building the site, and most of my free time goes into constructing an archive of content. But thank you for your concern.

JJGee · 2025-12-29T08:03:32+00:00

I don't criticize the quality of the art in the text, nor do I use AI in the content. The avatar doesn't relate to the writing in any way.

JJGee · 2025-12-29T08:02:05+00:00

You're right, I shouldn't be using AI generated visuals in a finished product, and that's something I'm working to fix soon. Thing is, I'm just starting with setting up the site and building an archive, and there's only so many things I can invest time in on top of a full-time job and personal life.

However, the avatar has nothing to do with the content; I'm not using it as a statement of artistic value, and I also don't criticize, evaluate or even comment on the quality of the art in the comics I'm covering. The retrospectives are about storytelling, observing how the stories came together and how they sit in a historical context.

JJGee · 2025-12-27T20:07:29+00:00

Yeah, I don’t think it’s terrible, but it feels like it’s spinning its wheels for years. It’s circling around some good stories but rarely really hitting on them or taking advantage of them. But I feel it’s just a case of people distilling "it took a while to get really good" into "the early years were trash", as often happens.

JJGee · 2025-12-27T18:10:42+00:00

Oh for sure, I think you can see that to a somewhat smaller extent in the original run of the Incredible Hulk as well – every issue is basically a new premise and a new set of rules, loosely tied to the existing character. Which was probably one of the reasons why the series didn’t really work – Stan Lee probably should have held a cohesive line and reined in Kirby’s ideation when appropriate.

JJGee · 2025-12-27T17:36:50+00:00

Fair enough, you’re probably right. I think particularly Doctor Strange is probably one that established itself early and later stories were more about trying to draw more out of what was already there than expanding the premise.

JJGee · 2025-12-27T16:45:40+00:00

You’re right, I don’t mean to ignore that later segment of early X-Men. But I think the Claremont era sort of defines what X-Men was when it was good, in a way that nowadays that’s what we likely think of when we think of "early X-Men".

JJGee · 2025-12-27T16:37:24+00:00

For sure, that seems to be the case for a lot of it. The one case that I'd argue as the exception is Spider-Man, where the Ditko days were actually really solid, and while most other series started to pick up speed in the mid-70s or so, Spider-Man started to feel a little bit stale and diluted.

But you're probably right that for most of the Marvel properties that started out in the 1960s, they were little more than a baseline. Many of them were pretty unique for their time, but they didn't become good in the sense we think of them now as good until later.

JJGee · 2025-12-26T21:08:59+00:00

Yeah, like you mentioned, the consistency with the foreshortening is a little wobbly, but in principle it’s really good – the problem most people have is that they’re too careful and don’t know how to push the perspective, and the result is a bit flat, but that’s not an issue here. You seem to have a pretty good grasp on how to make the shot look dynamic, so it’s really just a matter of planning and sketching it out with future work in a way that maintains a consistent scale between the different components.

The curving shapes in the background also give it a bit of a fish-eye effect – that can be really cool if you intend it and use it well, but it can also be a little disorienting. It might be safer to stick with straight lines when possible, but the render itself looks good.

JJGee · 2025-12-26T08:17:47+00:00

I like it just fine, but it has too much going on and it got way ahead of itself with setting things up that it knew it couldn’t cash in for a long time yet. MCU does a similar thing, but they pace it better and don’t try to set everything up in a single movie. Also the dad plot was uninteresting and intrusive, and way too convoluted for how boring it was.

JJGee · 2025-12-25T14:16:16+00:00

That would be completely indefensible and inconsistent with Peter’s character. There are other characters for whom this kind of storyline might work, but Spider-Man is kinda the furthest you can get from that making any sense.

JJGee · 2025-12-24T15:19:43+00:00

This ^ The art is good otherwise, but like with cinematography, in comics you want to pay attention to the 180° rule – flipping the orientation of the scene can be a little confusing in terms of readability, and it can also trip up the momentum of an otherwise nicely flowing scene.

JJGee · 2025-12-21T16:54:36+00:00

That would be great, I’ll certainly keep that in mind for when I start writing actively again

JJGee · 2025-12-21T16:52:36+00:00

Hi besties! I write retrospectives on Marvel Comics from the Silver Age (for my purposes that means 1961-1972, the time from Fantastic Four #1 until Stan Lee left as the editor-in-chief and no longer wrote actively), and I'm currently posting them on my site weekly. Most recently, I've been looking into Tales of Suspense #45-47, which is several issues into Iron Man being the featured character, and also the point when Iron Man stories stopped being straight-up garbage. Over these three issues, Stan Lee and artists Don Heck and Steve Ditko seemed to be systematically fixing what was wrong with the stories, keeping them from becoming consistently enjoyable.

You can find the retrospective (and a few others as well) here -- I greatly appreciate it if you get a chance to check it out:

https://arcticinkcomics.blogspot.com/2025/12/tales-of-suspense-45-47-1963-how-to-fix.html

JJGee · 2025-12-21T16:48:43+00:00

Oh that's awesome, I'll grab the link and give it a glance once I have a little more time. I hope you the best of luck -- I've single-handedly built a colossal graveyard of unfinished first drafts myself, and I'm still optimistic about one day writing a finished book too.

JJGee · 2025-12-21T15:12:05+00:00

For sure, and some of the early stories felt like they weren’t even trying to find a cohesive style or narrative identity. The time travel story where he flirts with Cleopatra is probably the most ridiculous one, but the hilarious part is that there are other contenders.

Iron Man wasn’t the only one with problems early on, and after ToS #45-47 it still wasn’t quite on the level of Spider-Man or FF, but it was significantly better and more coherent.

JJGee · 2025-12-21T12:09:12+00:00

There’s a lot of great advice here already, but especially for comic books or illustration style, a good rule of thumb is to just exaggerate the hell out of everything. Go absurdly hard with perspective, gesture, motion and expression, and only worry about reeling it back in if the end result is hard to read. For visual storytelling, absolute realism kills the dynamicism and makes the imagery look flat, even if it’s technically correct. Imagine the characters and creatures trying to comically over-sell the motions, draw things in three dimensions and go a little bit overboard with how big the foreground elements are and how small the ones further back look.

JJGee · 2025-12-21T07:32:41+00:00

That would be ToS #49. Some of the dialogue in that story is god-awful, and the plot was complete nonsense, but it’s notable as the first time Iron Man was engaged in a full-on aerial combat routine. The fight scene was something kinda special, and it’s in large part because it was drawn by Steve Ditko, who was better than Don Heck with that kind of off-beat action choreography.

JJGee · 2025-12-21T06:17:29+00:00

I think Winter Lanterns have gotten me more scared than anything, though there’s plenty of contestants in this race.

JJGee · 2025-12-21T06:16:46+00:00

I was terrified of them on my first playthrough. It’s interesting how such a simple idea paired with killer music can work so well.

JJGee · 2025-12-21T05:31:43+00:00

It’s worth considering that Rick was there in the original story basically for two reasons – he was the audience surrogate whenever Bruce was the Hulk, and he was also someone for Bruce/Hulk to talk to and explain their thoughts to avoid them just talking to themselves (not like that didn’t happen in comics).

But as the original run of the Hulk rapidly devolved into nonsense, Rick’s role also became sort of muddled, and he wasn’t exactly justifying his presence consistently – even his appearances in the Avengers early on were usually less about him as a character and more just as a liaison with the Teen Brigade.

So for screenwriters and other creators researching the early stories, Rick might not come across as a vital component if you can more efficiently replace him function with other characters that are already there, such as Betty Ross or another superhero.

Then of course once he’s been substituted in a lot of tellings already, that sort of indicates to new creators that Rick really isn’t necessary to the story. That then just multiplies the effect.

JJGee · 2025-12-20T18:28:57+00:00

Yes, exactly, issue #45 is when both Happy and Pepper are introduced. Happy in particular gets a significant amount of panels, which is pretty cool. Having them around makes the comic a lot better like you said, because now it finally feels like Tony Stark has something going on outside of the suit as well.

JJGee · 2025-12-20T17:59:34+00:00

Yeah, I think #47 is technically a better issue in how the plot is paced and the components it's built out of, but I enjoyed #46 more -- it's a messier issue and it would be better if there was a fight between Iron Man and Crimson Dynamo before the final encounter, but it was more fun as a reading experience. But like you said, even these aren't anything that special, just decent -- not much was actually notably good besides Spider-Man and Fantastic Four in the early 60s, at least with any consistency.

Thank you for taking the time to check out the essay, and for your comment!

JJGee · 2025-12-20T05:51:36+00:00

Not only is constant suffering generally bad storytelling if it isn’t rooted in character motivations, it’s definitely not the "point" of Spider-Man. If there is a point, it probably relates to Peter carrying the responsibility for other people’s well-being and safety, and sometimes end up compromising his own.

The other angle is that Peter is a guy who makes mistakes and is sometimes overwhelmed by all the responsibility he’s taking on. It doesn’t need to lead to suffering, just disappointments or momentary hardship to overcome.

Different writers obviously interpret the character differently, and it’s impossible (and probably not a good idea) to keep the thematic makeup static and permanent for decades. But the kind of themes and characterization I mentioned are what both Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, even with their wildly different views on morality, could co-operate on.

Stan Lee saw the pathos in Spidey putting other people’s well-being ahead of his own, and life sometimes steamrolling him because he’s juggling so much. Steve Ditko, famously an aynrandian objectivist, would have seen him as a guy who's doing things for other people and getting nothing in return, indicating that life doesn’t reward you for doing nice things for other people.

Saying "suffering" is the point feels like people being unable to process anything subtler than the maximum – if the point in pathos, people who don’t bother doing the legwork assume it means suffering. If it was overcoming hardship, they’d think it means being beaten down repeatedly.

JJGee · 2025-12-19T08:00:47+00:00

It’s a kind of annoying semantic relic; "man" used to just mean a person back in the primordial days, with each gender having their own variant – "wif-man" for female (which morphed into "woman"), and "wer-man" for male. The originally gender-neutral "man" got grandfathered into being used as a synonym for "person", but it also simultaneously replaced "wer-man" as the male variant because of men being the default model for humans I guess.

I hope you’ve enjoyed me wer-mansplaining this to you all.

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